Wednesday, April 30, 2014

200 wine additives: comment on a post about a story

I wrote a story about a $150 corkage fee for Wine-Searcher, quoting Tom Wark. Tom wrote a post about it on his own blog. His post got a comment from a reader named Holly Evans-White, a portion of which I think needs to be seen by a wider audience.

"If my husband makes it; we aren’t going to order it. He works for a big-box that owns over 20 labels and these wines are well represented at ghastly inflated prices throughout the country – Napa Valley & S.F. too – and this morning he was having trouble with the machine that shoots one of 200 additives into their wines."

Mmm! I wonder how many of those wines' back labels talk about the taste of terroir?

5 comments:

Blake, why don't you find out who those wineries are? In under 5 seconds I was able to see that Holly owns a wine consulting company in the bay area. Surely we can find out her husbands labels and out them.

I'm not sure outing one of what she calls the "big box" producers would be fair. Reading her quote, I can't decide which of three big producers is my immediate favorite to be the one, and there are two dark horses.

Picking on only one of them because one of their winemakers has an honest wife strikes me not only as unfair, but puts her at more risk of getting him in trouble, worsening the chilling effect for candid comments that I admit I probably already started with this post.

I just think it's a fast candid introduction to what you're really getting when you buy "big box" supermarket wine.

But it does seem as if at some point, someone has to start calling these 'wine-like products' companies out for what they are. No one forced her to post these comments. And she is a wine consultant (according to LinkedIn), not some unsuspecting wife who knows not what her 'wine' producing husband is up to. Do we really have to protect her from getting him in trouble? If this causes blowback for him from his company, that would beg the question as to why they are directing him to use these additives in the first place.

Seems like an opportunity to further crack open a window opened by someone else - someone in the know - and shed a little more light on things.

I challenge anyone to produce a list of 200 "additives" used in wine. Seems there's a bit of hyperbole at play here. Also what "additives" are used, enter the process at various stages - at the hopper (SO2), in the fermentation (DAP,tannin,concentrate,bentonite, etc), in Barrel (egg white, isinglas,etc), in tank prior to bottling (citric acid, etc). So where exactly does this mystical machine come into use "injecting" all of these awful things into wine? And don't fool yourself into thinking that "artisinal" winemakers don't use most of these same additives.

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